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Comparison of Online image storage providers
There are a large number of companies that provide the ability to upload/share/view images on the web. These organizations provide free online image storage. These sites use freemium business model. The free version of these products typically has some restrictions on size of images. Typical features of online image storage provided by these sites include:- Host images and videos
- Images hosted at these sites may be accessed from blogs and websites
- Organizing photos into albums, tagging photos
- Searching images based upon a tag
- Provide web services API to perform operations on images stored in the web site
- Setting access control on images
- Providing comments on images
In this article, thecloudtutorial has reviews of six leading online image storage sites.
- Flickr (owned by Yahoo)
- Fotolog
- Photobucket (owned by Fox interactive media)
- Webshots (owned by American Greetings)
- Imagebam
- Ziddu
A comparison of free version of these sites is included below.
| Vendor | Storage Size | Video | Advertising |
|---|---|---|---|
| Flickr | 100 MB per month; 10MB per image | 2 videos | Yes |
| Fotolog | One image per day | n/a | Yes |
| PhotoBucket | 500 MB; 1MB per image | Less than 5 minutes per video | Yes |
| Webshots | 100 images per month | 10 videos per month | Yes |
| Imagebam | 3MB per image | n/a | Yes |
| Ziddu | 200 MB | n/a | Yes |
Flickr, owned by yahoo, is the most popular site for storing images online. In addition to restriction on space for monthly upload, user can access only a maximum of 200 photos in the photostream. The disk space restriction of 100MB per month cannot be increased by deleting images.
Photobucket has monthly bandwidth limit of 10GB on data transfer traffic. Ziddu does not have a premium version.
The table below provides a comparison of the premium version of online image storage providers.
| Vendor | Storage Size | Video | Charges |
|---|---|---|---|
| Flickr | Unlimited; 20MB per photo. | Unlimited no of videos; Limit of 90 seconds max, 500MB per video. | $24.95 annually |
| Fotolog | Six images per day | n/a | $2.75 for two weeks |
| Photobucket | Unlimited; 20MB per image | 10 minutes per video & 300MB | $24.95 annually |
| Webshots | 500 images per month | 50 videos per month | $19.99 annually |
| Imagebam | 3MB file size limit | n/a | €9.95 annually |